Identity politics

Exploring the history of Koreans in the Russian Far East from the perspective of New Imperial History, the article demonstrates that political activism of Koreans and policies of the Russian (Soviet), Korean, and Japanese governments resulted in consolidation of two visions of their future. The first vision implied unity between the Koreans living in the Russian Far East with those who stayed in Korea, moved to Japan, or emigrated elsewhere and corresponded to the agenda of building a Korean nation. The second vision implied that the bilingual or Russified Koreans aspired to stay in the Russian Far East permanently, ensuring their own livelihood in the new regional frontier. The two currents interlaced in the project of Korean autonomy in a post-imperial state, first the Far Eastern Republic and later the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. The project involved inclusion of Koreans into the global spread of revolution through the Communist International and left open the issue ...

With the coming to power of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), led by its leader Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Turkish Muslim nationalism, a new national ideology promoted by the AKP, laid the foundations for a new Turkey and new Turks. Yeni Türkiye Yolunda (Towards a new Turkey) is the slogan used by the Erdoğan’s party to support a more nationalist Turkey intertwined with its Ottoman and Islamic heritage. In this paper, I put forward the claim that a number of State-sponsored institutions, including new national museums, play a relevant role in shaping this new Turkey. The aim is to investigate how museums operate as instruments of national identity building by exhibiting a fictitious national past. The case study of the Kabatepe Simulation Centre and Museum will serve this purpose. By interviewing politicians, bureaucrats, and historians, I have researched the links between a ruling class that supports Turkish Muslim nationalism, and new public museums, which exhibits it.

This edited collection examines the ways in which football in Africa is intimately bound up with deeper social, cultural and political currents, using the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa as a lens for this analysis. Drawing from a wide range of theoretical and methodological perspectives, the volume explores symbolic inscriptions and multiple narratives around the first World Cup on African soil and how these narratives inform an understanding of football and Africa. The authors are drawn from diverse disciplines across cultural studies, sports science, journalism, media studies and sociology, and they tackle four key themes: identity construction, African fan cultures, African media narratives and global media narratives. Empirical data is gleaned from a variety of sources such archival media texts, blogs, travelogues, diary material, ethnographic interviews and other online sources. This is the first book to consider African football as mediated discourse around which multiple...

Exploring how ordinary people in Myanmar access justice and resolve disputes, this book draws on a unique collectionf of ethnographic studies to trace the wider dynamics of state making, identity politics and authority-making in a society in contested transition.

Language, along with ethnicity or religion, is widely regarded as a core aspect of personal and group identity. Just as it would be monstrous to force someone to renounce their religion, and absurd to expect them to change ethnicity, so too must an individual’s language receive respect, we are told, lest its oppressors stand revealed as the moral equivalent of Nazis. Yet compromises do occur—new languages are learned, old ones are neglected, conversions take place, and even ethnicity is subject to a certain amount of renegotiation and contextualization. We might expect to find language rights violations concentrated in the developing world, where human rights in general tend to be least respected. A peculiarity of the literature on language rights, however, is that, as often as not, the countries which it targets are relatively progressive ones with strong traditions of democracy and human rights. A number of writers use terms like “linguistic genocide” or “linguicide” (we shall treat them as synonyms) for policies that encourage language shift or language death. It is a point of continuing debate whether “genocide” necessarily involves mass murder, or whether attempts merely to disband or assimilate an identity group—without killing its people—might also qualify. Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and her husband, Robert Phillipson produce studies to argue that the denial of mother-tongue education qualifies as “serious . . . mental harm.” To the extent that the concept of “linguistic genocide” is at all legitimate or useful—we are not convinced that it is—the experience of the Kurds would surely qualify as a preeminent example. This unavoidable vagueness of group identity turns out to pose a major difficulty to the concept of linguistic genocide.

The emergence of network-movements since 2011 has opened the debate around the way in which social media and networked practices make possible innovative forms of collective identity. We briefly review the literature on social movements and ‘collective identity’, and show the tension between different positions stressing either organization or culture, the personal or the collective, aggregative or networking logics. We argue that the 15M (indignados) network-movement in Spain demands conceptual and methodological innovations. Its rapid emergence, endurance, diversity, multifaceted development and adaptive capacity, posit numerous theoretical and methodological challenges. We show how the use of structural and dynamic analysis of interaction networks (in combination with qualitative data) is a valuable tool to track the shape and change of what we term the ‘systemic dimension’ of collective identities in network-movements. In particular, we introduce a novel method for synchrony detection in Facebook activity to identify the distributed, yet integrated, coordinated activity behind collective identities. Applying this analytical strategy to the 15M movement, we show how it displays a specific form of systemic collective identity we call ‘multitudinous identity’, characterized by social transversality and internal heterogeneity, as well as a transient and distributed leadership driven by action initiatives. Our approach attends to the role of distributed interaction and transient leadership at a mesoscale level of organizational dynamics, which may contribute to contemporary discussions of collective identity in network-movements.

In contrast to the largely functionalist and apolitical literature which dominates organizational scholarship on exploitation and exploration after March, this paper seeks to complement this view of exploitation and exploration with a Marxist reading which is unwittingly implied by these terms. More specifically, we combine neo-Marxist and paleo-Marxist arguments to more fully understand the conflictual relations that underpin exploitation and exploration in the management of firms. This enables us to address both the objective and subjective dimensions of exploitation and exploration which firms and workers are involved in through the contemporary capitalist labour process. We illustrate this by drawing on a case study of a large Swedish manufacturing firm which sought to improve lean production by systematically helping employees to explore their own lifestyles and possibilities for a healthier and happier life. Keywords: Exploitation and exploration; labour process theory; lean production; paleo-Marxism; struggle; workplace health promotion.

Maig del 2014. En una mateixa setmana es realitzen tres actes a l'àrea de Barcelona (una classe dins del Grau en Antropologia, un seminari amb estudiants de Màster i una conferència oberta al gran públic per part d'un novel·lista britànic) on, malgrat la diferència d'ambients i públic, es comparteix el mateix tema d'interès: la " qüestió de la identitat ". Es tracta d'una simple casualitat? Una anècdota sense més importància? O és un símptoma d'un fenomen recurrent: la presència dominant de la paraula identitat i del seu pes explicatiu en els debats contemporanis, tant públics com acadèmics? Avui dia és d'allò més habitual trobar conferències, congressos, articles i línies d'investigació on apareix la noció d'identitat, habitualment al costat de substantius (també força abstractes, omnipresents, i mal o gens definits) com globalització o diversitat. Als quals cal afegir, si es vol major èxit de convocatòria, les paraules clau immigració,...

Contrariamente às evocações do desaparecimento do movimento feminista, é possível identificar sua presença constante na sociedade brasileira, marcada por uma gama muito variada de identidades políticas, diferentes graus de institucionalização e diversos modos de expressão. O objetivo deste artigo é explorar, a partir da análise da Marcha das vadias, os contrastes e continuidades entre diferentes gerações de feministas, especialmente em relação ao modo como a questão da diversidade e inclusão de gênero, raça, sexualidade e gerações vem sendo tratada.

In this paper, we reflect on the caste-violence perpetrated on lower castes by Bhumihars, one of the dominant castes in Bihar, India, as it indicates their complex relationship with important socio-economic and political issues such as land relations, identity assertion and socio economic differentiation, among others. We also pay attention to ideological and moral constructs embedded in the narratives about Bhumihars, which provides legitimacy to their violence. Several narratives and personal interviews have been incorporated in our analysis along with a broader mapping of Bhumihars’ historical engagement with violence as a form of caste assertion and its changing character in the contemporary era marked by ‘backward-caste’ mobilisation and the rise of Hindu right-wing politics in Bihar. Our critical study traces these historical trajectories and points to a decisive shift from Bhumihars’ engagement with direct violence towards a more subtle and symbolic form of violence, often masquerading as their articulation and expression of caste identity.

Although identity issues have been central to Okinawan grass-roots movements, until recently few politicians have explicitly campaigned on identity appeals, rather than pacifist ideology or material promises in the form of economic development and welfare. The emergence of identity politics seeking to replace such left–right ideological competition in Okinawa appears to be a new phenomenon. Has it only been under Governor Onaga Takeshi and his ‘All Okinawa’ movement that identity has been used to mobilize voters in local elections? And if so, why has this new type of identity politics emerged with such force since 2014? The type of identity politics emerging under Onaga and his movement is arguably one with strong populist features, which seek to appeal to the unity of a virtuous Okinawan people against a discriminatory Japanese mainland. In Okinawa’s ‘regionalist populism’, how are the ‘people’ defined and their ‘will’ revealed? How are the ‘enemies’ understood and framed? This article seeks to answer these two sets of questions concerning subnational identity politics and populism by investigating identity politics in Okinawan. To this end, the study will systematically draw upon campaign literature and speeches of local politicians, as well as deliberations and speeches in the Okinawa assembly, among other material in the post-reversion period (1972–2018). We suggest that this rising identity politics is indeed new and is born from a number of socio-economic developments, primarily an unprecedented level of distrust towards mainstream parties, the central government, and mainland Japanese among Okinawan voters.

""Investigating how a number of modern empires transform over the long 19th century (1789-1914) as a consequence of their struggle for ascendancy in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, Foundations of Modernity moves the study of the modern empire towards a comparative, trans-regional analysis of events along the Ottoman frontiers: Western Balkans, the Persian Gulf and Yemen. This inter-disciplinary approach of studying events at different ends of the Ottoman Empire challenges previous emphasis on Europe as the only source of change and highlights the progression of modern imperial states while emphasizing a kind of pre-globalization cosmopolitanism largely erased by discourses of modernity. As such, the book introduces an entirely new analytical approach to the study of modern state power and the social consequences to the interaction between long-ignored "historical agents" like pirates, smugglers, refugees, and the rural poor. In this respect, the roots of the most fundamental institutions and bureaucratic practices associated with the modern state prove to be the by-products of certain kinds of productive exchange long categorized in negative terms in post-colonial and mainstream scholarship. Such a challenge to conventional methods of historical and social scientific analysis is reinforced by the novel use of the work of Louis Althusser, Talal Asad, William Connolly and Frederick Cooper, whose challenges to scholarly conventions will prove helpful in changing how we understand the origins of our modern world and thus talk about Modernity. ""

This article consists of reflections about the concepts, theories, epistemologies and identity politics. The goal is to problematize the use of the concception of identity in such polices from our academic, political and affective insertions/implications. .For that, we used narratives and scenes analyzers that we have experienced in some areas of our academic, professional and militant action within the movement for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) and the antimanicomial movement. In these spaces, the concept of identity is often used as having what can be called as a “political productivity”. For us, it is important to analyze the primacy of identity as a tool of thought, production of knowledge and political struggle. When this word is used, which enunciation make it possible? When one operates with the concept of identity, or even of identification, which limits are imposed, which plaster, which catches occur? We wonder if the cultural/sexual/racial identities face the globalization and the homogenization of cultural and existential territories or if the waves of identity claim of the so called minorities would be poorly placed as a response, indicating that is exactly the identity reference that should be discussed. We try to draw some new ways for a new policy: we underline what policy we want to articulate with and we indicate what policy we try to be different from. The challenge here is to think about the limits for the use and the centrality of the concept of identity for both social movements and the construction of public policies.

... O'Neill Stacks PJ6773 .H34 2003 The sacred mountain / Charles Corm; Carol-Ann Goff-Kfouri; Paul Jahshan. Louaize, Lebanon: Notre Dame University Press. 2004. Offsite Collection Stacks PQ3979 .C6 M613 2004 Why are the Arabs not free? ...

Marko Babić, Iwona Jakimowicz-Ostrowska (red.) Recenzent: prof. zw. dr. hab. Radosław Zenderowski Table of content Introduction I. GEOPOLITICS IN THE BALKANS Waldemar Paruch, Consolidation and political rivalry in the Balkans Marko Babić, Russia in the Western Balkans. National interests and political influence II. CHALLENGES FOR THE CONTEMPORARY BALKAN STATES Ewa Bujwid-Kurek, Constitutional conditions of the territorial integrity of the Republic of Serbia Wiktor Hebda, The Republic of Srpska of Bosnia and Herzegovina in the context of political and economic relations with the Republic of Serbia 1995-2010 Jacek Wojnicki, The nation-building process in Slovenia Agata Biernat, Albania in NATO and its security impact in the region III THE EU ROLE WITHIN POLITICAL PROCESSES IN THE BALKANS Bogusław Jagusiak, Profits and Risks of the Balkan States’ Membership in the European Union Wojciech Szczepański, The Belgrade – Pristina dialogue: a challenge on the Serbia’s and Kosovo’s integration...

Identity issues have become increasingly controversial in the modern world, yet research on identity is fractured into several disciplinary approaches. “Signs of identity” synthesizes insights from sociology, anthropology, social and political psychology, semiotics and humanities into an original theory of collective identity. By addressing the current issues of authenticity and the self, multiculturalism, intersectionality and social justice, the book helps to stimulate discussion of the contested topics of identity in contemporary society.

Active citizen participation is increasingly being recognized as essential to effective public policymaking. A key challenge for public administrators is how to effectively engage constituents' diverse viewpoints in sound deliberation that will likely result in coherent, ...